Faculty Events & Workshops

Faculty Institute 2025

2025 CEL Faculty Institute: What’s Next for CEL? Charting the Course for Transformative Change  

Virtual Plenary Panel: Wednesday April 23, 2:30-4 p.m. ET 

In-person Gathering: Tuesday, April 29, 8:45 a.m. – 4:15 p.m. ET 

The Centre for Community Partnerships (CCP) invites you to attend the 2025 Community-Engaged Learning (CEL) Faculty Institute, What’s Next for Community-Engaged Learning? Charting the Course for Transformative Change. 

The CEL Faculty Institute is an annual event that brings together CEL instructors from across the University of Toronto to share and learn from each other about effective strategies for CEL teaching, informed by the latest research and on-the-ground experience. The two-part event will take place over two days, the first featuring a virtual plenary panel and the second, an in-person day at the University of Toronto St. George Campus. This year’s Institute will offer an opportunity to reflect on 20 years of CEL at U of T, and to further our collective critical thinking about the future of CEL.   

Course Development Workshops

Join us for our three-part CEL Course Development Workshops Series. The workshops can be stand alone or completed as a series. Note: These will be participatory workshops where attendees will be invited to do some free-writing and some breakout group discussions. 

These workshops will be offered again in Fall 2025 and Winter 2026.

Course Development Workshop 1: Fundamentals of CEL

In this workshop, best suited to instructors who are new to CEL, we focus on the fundamentals of community-engaged learning (CEL) pedagogy and practice. The workshop will:

• introduce you to what CEL is and how it is defined, why you might want to use a CEL pedagogy, and some models and examples for CEL courses;
• give you space and time to think through some foundational questions as you begin designing your own CEL course.

Course Development Workshop 2: Designing a Successful CEL Course

In this second workshop we focus on the three ‘Ps’ of CEL course development: pedagogy, partnerships and student preparation. Focusing on the three ‘Ps’, the workshop will: 1) provide you with some practical strategies for designing and running a CEL course and 2) provide you space and time to work on a syllabus you are designing or redesigning for a CEL course. 

Course Development Workshop 3: Designing a Successful CEL Course

In this third workshop of the CEL course development workshop series, we focus on working respectfully and equitably with partners from community, grassroots, nonprofit, or public organizations. The workshop will provide practical strategies for, and space and time to discuss and reflect on, stewarding partnerships in respectful and reciprocal ways. 

Faculty Roundtables

Opportunities for faculty across the university to learn and discuss anti-oppressive approaches to community-engaged learning and research (CEL/R)

Missed a Roundtable? Visit our Past Faculty Events where you can find links to recordings of past roundtables.

Other Events and Workshops

Other opportunities to explore CEL/R pedagogies and practices in partnership with other university research and teaching support offices

Community-Engaged Research Faculty Discussion Club Series, hosted by the Centre for Research Innovation and Support in collaboration with the Centre for Community Partnerships

The Centre for Research and Innovation Support (CRIS) and Centre for Community Partnerships invite you to join us for the next session in the Community Engaged Research Discussion Club. This series is for researchers with an interest in deepening their theoretical and practical understanding of community engaged research to connect with, and learn together from, colleagues from across the tri-campus in order to strengthen both societal and scholarly impact.

The theme for the Fall 2024 re-launch of the series will build off the previous year’s theme, “Initiating and Building the Relationship,” and will focus on common challenges novice and experienced community engaged researchers may encounter as they continue to develop their research relationships.

Community Engaged Research Discussion Club –
The Dance of Art and Understanding: Theatre methodologies in community-focused research

Date: Tuesday, March 4, 2025 
Time: 10:30 a.m. – 12 p.m. 
Location: Online (Zoom) 

This session will focus on the topic: theatre methodologies in community-focused research. Professor Kathleen Gallagher and Playwright / Director Andrew Kushnir will tell the story of building a long-standing collaboration through two projects: “Youth, Theatre, Radical Hope and the Ethical Imaginary: an intercultural investigation of drama pedagogy, performance and civic engagement (2014-2019)” and “Global Youth (Digital) Citizen-Artists and their Publics: Performing for Socio-Ecological Justice (2019-2026)”. They invite participants to explore with them the following questions: 

Why the arts–and specifically theatre–as a methodology in community-focused research?  

How does an inquiry led by art-making curiosity change how a researcher understands what they are researching?  

How do we understand “community” across geographies and boundaries, including boundaries between inside and outside academia?  

How does community-building transpire in and through global intercultural exchange in service of research?  

How is pedagogy conferred in the process of community-focused research?  

Moderator: Alison Mountz, Professor, Department of Geography and Planning, Interim Vice-Principal Research & Innovation, UTSC

Panelists:

• Kathleen Gallagher, Distinguished Professor, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, and Director, Centre for Drama, Theatre & Performance Studies
• Andrew Kushnir, Artistic Director, Project: Humanity and Award-Winning Playwright, Director, and Activist

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